One of the biggest questions that I have about education, which I think lacks a concrete answer, regards its purpose in reference to time.
During one of my high school English classes, I specifically remember that after my teacher had stated an arbitrary fact that indeed no one in the class had known, he said something along the lines of “I mean to tell you this not because I suspect it is something new that most of you have probably have not heard of before” (education= expanding our knowledge, database, vocabulary, etc), “instead I say things like this because of the effect that I think it will have in the present—in this classroom” (education= gaining momentary pieces of information that expose us to trains of thought, which shape us and impact us as we experience them). The two very different ways of looking at obtaining knowledge presented here bring up the following question: is education more about being able to draw on past archives (perhaps going out of my way to remember this new fact that my teacher presented and sometime in the future, being able to relay it back to someone else) or is education more about accepting that our contact with new material will shape us as we come in contact with it, and then sort of just moving on as somewhat changed people? Or is there some sort of in-between?
I realize that this question is quite epistemological and therefore branches out past the topic of education in a classroom setting. Moran admits that “the modes of interdisciplinarity discussed in [Literature Into Culture] are characterized by their uncertainty about how knowledge is formulated and how disciplines fit together.” The education system, too, simply takes a position on “how knowledge is formulated and how the disciplines fit together” and sculpts a whole system that, too, embodies these epistemological ideals. It does makes sense that knowledge would be organized in such a way, but it also reveals the inconsistency within the system.